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AFTER PUBLISHING COMES MARKETING

Once you've uploaded your manuscript it only takes about 12 hours after you've hit the publish button for it to appear as an offering at the Kindle Store. But, you're not really done. You've just started to make the sale, and now you have to learn how to market your work to close the sales.

In times past, all you had to do was get a literary agent and they would get the publishing house. The publishing house would then do all the marketing for the book in order to make the sales. This doesn't happen anymore. They either want known authors who have an audience already or they want you to do your own marketing. This can be quite a hat switch from author to marketer, but it's pretty much expected even if you publish and ebook or get a publishing house to publish your book for you. You will still have to bear the brunt of doing most of the upfront marketing work.

The nice thing is though that you can build your audience for yourself and once your name is known, you can go anywhere and that audience will follow you. You will know how to generate more interest for your work and you won't be dependent on finding a literary agent or a publishing house that is willing to publish your work. In a lot of ways, it offers you a lot more creative freedom to see what the market will accept versus what a publisher may deem to be unmarketable. And, it doesn't cost too much in money, although it can take quite a bit of time to keep an active marketing campaign going.

Lucky for you, the Internet has made marketing online a very simple matter. You aren't going to be wasting any gas, you won't have to pay anyone unless you want to, and you can reach thousands, if not millions of readers, through very simple online marketing practices. Here, we will discuss some of the strategies to expose your work to more readers, not just the ones who go the Kindle bookstore already, and thus make more sales.

ONLINE INTERNET MARKETING

Believe it or not, you've already learned some online Internet marketing from this ebook. Once you started learning about keywords and how to get them, you've entered the world of Internet marketing. Those keywords can be used in multiple ways to help increase your exposure on the Internet, so keep them handy.

When we get into the subject of Internet marketing, it's inevitable that we need to discuss the many forums and areas on the Internet where people congregate to talk, learn, and publicize themselves. So, here we are going to categorize those Internet activities by the type of group that you might want to join in order to start getting the word out about your book. They may be blogging communities, social networking sites, discussion forums, and other types of media groups like YouTube or podcasters.

YOUR AUDIENCE MATTERS

However, before we get to these, let's take the time to examine the audience you are trying to attract. If your book is about toy trains, the groups that you want to access should have toy train enthusiasts and hobbyists in their ranks. No matter how large or popular a forum is, if they don't have the

audience you need to sell your book, then, they're simply not worth the effort. What is going to sell your ebook is to connect the audience demographic that likes your topic to the ebook on the Kindle Store. If the two don't match, the odds of a sale are very low. So, stick with those people you know will be interested in your topic to begin with.

PLACES YOU WANT TO JOIN TO MARKET YOUR EBOOK

BLOGGING COMMUNITIES

Many blogs offer places to comment on the posting. This affords you a great opportunity to find blogs associated with the topic of your ebook and then comment on the posting. At the end, you can add a link to your ebook URL. Just be careful how you do this, as no one wants to see a fluff comment on their blog with a link back to some merchandising. That's called spam. Instead, address the post thoughtfully and mention your ebook when it applies.

Now, if you want to do a number of these at one time, check out the keywords the blog is using and insert that into the search engine for the blogging community. That should pull up associated blogs also talking about the same topic. Now, add your comments there too.

You can even trade with bloggers to get some exposure to your ebook. You can contact the blogger and ask them if they would like a free copy of your ebook in exchange for a review, if they like the ebook. Obviously, if they don't like the ebook, you don't want them writing a negative review about it. So, this will help to spur sales from that bloggers audience too and give you an air of credibility because you've associated yourself with them.

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

This is one of the most underutilized areas right now in marketing, so the field is much less competitive than other strategies. All you need to do is add some profiles to places like Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and, many, many more. In fact, there's so many of them and more coming out each day, that we won't be able to go over all of them. But, we'll give you a sampling of how to use some of the more popular ones to help you get started. This topic is so vast it would really pay for you to buy an ebook on this subject alone, and get started before everyone else saturates the market.

Twitter

This is one of the most unusual social networking sites in that they allow you to "tweet" people in messages of 140 characters or less throughout the day. People listen to these tweets and try to follow you around as your being active in your life. So, in a way it's like blogging, but in microbursts.

The whole idea behind twitter is that if something really interesting is happening in your life, your updates may end up getting a massive audience. People have generated a large audience through simply detailing how they are laid off and the process of leaving their job, being present during a newsworthy event, or simply having interesting personalities that make the day unusual.

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Step 3 - The Structure

This is another area of article writing where writers just drop the ball. How do they do this? Well, they basically start writing and don’t stop until they’re done writing. But along the way, they had no direction or focus.

In short...their article is ALL over the place. Following it is like trying to follow a road map that has been shredded to pieces and you’re sitting there with glue trying to piece it back together.

Good luck with that!

Articles need structure. But not just ANY structure. They need a structure that is easy to follow and digest.

Why?

The average reading level of the adult population in the US is about 8 th grade. That’s your audience. That’s who you’re writing for.

Not only that...the average attention span of most people these days is close to nil. You have to give them what you want to give them in small chunks so that they can digest them easily. Otherwise, they will tune you out.

Notice that the writing in this report is in very short paragraphs of usually no more than three or four lines? There’s a reason for that. It has to do with how people comprehend things as far as quantity.

So, structure is important. Without going into a big long spiel on the subject, this is essentially what you want to do.

Structure articles into 3 to 5 paragraphs tops.

Paragraph 1 is your intro paragraph.

Paragraphs 2 - 4 contain the main points of your article.

Paragraph 5 contains your summary or conclusion.

Keep paragraphs short...3 to 5 lines tops.

That’s it in a nutshell. If you do these 5 simple things, you’ll find that your articles are very easy to read and digest.

Step 4 - Call To Action

Our final step is the call to action. This is what you want your reader to do after they’re done reading your article.

The mistake a lot of article writers make, when creating a call to action, is to drop a standard bio at the end of the article.

For example, they will do something like this.

“Dr. John Doe is a respected PhD in the field of psychiatry. He is a graduate of Yale and has worked for the US government for the past 15 years. If you’d like more information on Dr.

I hate to break this to you. Nobody cares about who you are or what you’ve done with your life. The only thing they care about is what you can do for them.

How can YOU help THEM?

If you don’t make that clear in your call to action, you won’t get people to your site to purchase whatever it is you want them to purchase.

Now...this call to action for Dr. John Doe will perform much better.

“Can’t shake your depression? Tried everything and NOTHING works? Visit Dr. John Doe’s site and discover how YOU can cure your depression in as little as 7 days... GUARANTEED. ”

THAT is what readers want to see...a solution to their problem. They don’t care who you are. They just want their problem to go away.

If you get nothing else out of this report, get this much. You MUST give people a good reason to want to go to your site.

That you’re a PhD in psychiatry isn’t going to cut it.

Here is a simple blueprint for a call to action that works wonders.

Remind them of their pain

Give them a site to go to

Tell them what they’re going to get when they go to the site It’s really THAT simple.

If you do these three things, you will find that your articles will bring more visitors to your web page than ever before.

Some Final Words

I would like to say that one of those four steps is more important that the other. But the truth is, if you screw up even just ONE of them, your article is going to suffer greatly for it.

Think of an article as a sports team. Sure, no one player (unless you were Michael Jordan) is irreplaceable but the loss of a key member is going to hurt the team somewhat.

Now, when your team is only composed of 4 members, such as our 4 steps to article writing success, what happens if we lose one of them? You’ve essentially lost Va of your team. That’s a substantial loss.

Think about it.

If the topic isn’t one that’s popular, there will be very few people to read it. Even if everything else is good, you’re still dealing with a limited number of readers and therefore, limited earning potential.

If the title doesn’t grab somebody’s attention, it doesn’t matter that there are tons of readers out there interested in the subject. The title will keep them from even reading the article if it doesn’t excite them.

If the article is poorly structured, people will stop reading midway through. How far they get will depend on how poor the structure is. If they stop reading, that means they don’t get down to the call to action. That means they don’t make it to your site.

Finally, if the call to action is weak, the reader simply won’t follow it. That means everything that came before it was for nothing. So as you can see, every piece of your article is important.